Saturday, 1 November 2014

Hardware support news

I dusted off (literally) my Logitech Marble trackball to replace the Intuos tablet + mouse combination that I was using to cut down on the lateral movement of my right arm which led to back pains.

Not that you care about that one bit, but that meant that I needed a way to get a scroll wheel working with this scroll-wheel less trackball. That's now implemented in gnome-settings-daemon for GNOME 3.16. You'd run:

Touchscreens are now switched off when the screensaver is on. This means you'll usually need to use one of the hardware buttons on tablets, or a mouse or keyboard on laptops to turn the screen back on.

Note that you'll need a kernel patch to avoid surprises when the touchscreen is re-enabled.

More touchscreens

The driver for the Goodix touchscreen found in the Onda v975w is now upstream as well.

This makes the far left button the normal left click, clicking left small button is like clicking the scrollwheel and opening links in new tabs etc, holding this small button enables scrolling using the ball.The small right button is still 'next' because I don't have a use for it.

This is great news for me! I too use a trackball, and while it does have a scroll wheel it's a bit inconveniently positioned and only one-dimensional. Does scroll wheel emulation enable two-dimensional scrolling, ie. horizontal and vertical, at the same time?